Chapter Forty-one
The judge had observed his older son’s car parked at the curb of Doc’s house and then he had watched as his younger son followed Mitch inside. Push had come to shove again. He had lied to his son Mitch in many ways, but the pertinent one at the moment was the lie that claimed that he, Tom, had told Quentin and Nathan that Mitch had witnessed what they did to the girl’s body. He had never told them any of that. They had no idea Mitch had been hiding in the supply closet that night or that he had seen the whole thing. They had never known, never threatened Mitch in any way.
But he had told Mitch they did, to justify getting him out of town.
And now Mitch was going over there, possibly to confront Quentin, who wouldn’t know what the hell he was talking about but who might decide now was the time to tell certain other secrets.
Tom hurried to the gun case in his office.
He unlocked it and then pulled out Mitch’s first rifle.
He might be able to get Mitch off of a murder charge, he told himself, but what he couldn’t do was allow Quentin to talk about what he had known for the last seventeen years.
It was a quiet street with few cars on it at any time.
He knew that half of success in life was walking confidently and that witnesses saw what they wanted to see. If he walked with a sure stride across the street to Quentin’s home and if he was carrying a rifle at his side, and if any neighbors saw him, they would see only who they wanted to see: Tom, their neighbor, the judge. And if they saw more than that, then it was their word against his and nobody’s word ever stood up against his.
At the front of the house, the screen door was closed but the wooden door was open.
From within, he heard Mitch’s voice raised in anger.
Tom stepped quietly through into the living room.
They were in the kitchen, arguing.
He heard Quentin saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“The hell you don’t!” Mitch retorted, and then he said, “Maybe Nathan Shellenberger will have a better memory than you do.”
Tom stepped out of sight as his oldest son stormed through from the kitchen and slammed his way out of the house. He was followed by Jeffrey, who ran after him, yelling, “Mitch! Wait for me!”
Tom stepped around the corner, into the kitchen, before Quentin could go back into his clinic.
“What did you tell him?” he asked.
“Nothing.” Quentin saw the rifle, then raised alarmed eyes to his old friend.
Tom nodded, believing him. But Mitch might not stop until he had answers, and Quentin was the only living person who could still provide them. Tom had already made sure that the only other person who knew about Sarah…his own wife…had been silenced. With a touch of poetic justice that he liked, he had led Nadine by the hand into the blizzard and watched her wander off, as lost and confused as that girl had been the night that Nadine took her, naked, into that other snowstorm. In Nadine’s dementia, she had been starting to say things, little remembered things, that harked back to days that shouldn’t be recalled or spoken of, so Tom had taken care of it by letting nature render judgment on her.
But nobody was going to render judgment on him.
He hadn’t done anything wrong. The girl had wanted to have sex with him. She had wanted to have the baby. He had paid her fairly, taken care of her as well as Nadine would allow him to. And God knows, he had raised the troublesome child when he could have told her to have it aborted, or forced her to adopt it out to strangers.
He was, in his own mind, not guilty of anything.
Nadine had killed the girl, not him.
And Quentin was forcing him to take these measures, when God knew, he would rather not have raised the rifle and held it on his oldest friend.
“Lock the door to your office, Quentin.”
The doctor did so. “Tom, you don’t really-”
It was all he got a chance to say.
The judge put the rifle on the floor, took off the gloves he’d worn to carry and shoot it, and carried them out the front door with him. Then he walked with confident strides back across the street and into the house.
He noticed a red truck parked down the street, but paid no attention to it.
People saw what they were expecting to see. And his word was law.
It was only when he walked into his house that he found himself surprised by something. Or rather, by someone.
“Hey, Judge,” said the disheveled-looking drunk who had walked in the front door that the judge, for once in his life, had left unlocked. “Remember me? You put me in jail a few times, right? Made me pay a few fines, right? Well, not this time. This time, I’m the one’s come to collect from you.”
Marty Francis stood weaving on the fine Persian carpet on the floor of the judge’s living room. When Tom was able to figure out that the man was there to blackmail him to keep secret the identity of the girl in the grave, Tom said, “I don’t have that much money in the house. Let’s take a drive together and I’ll get it from the bank for you.”
Docile as a lamb being led by its own greed to slaughter, Marty followed the judge out to the black Cadillac in the driveway.
Once they were inside of it, the judge locked the doors.
He backed down his driveway and drove rapidly down the street.
When he reached the corner he turned left toward the highway instead of right toward downtown.
“There ain’t no bank out this way,” Marty objected.
“I keep my checkbook out at a little ranch we have.”
A ranch where a person could be shut into a storm cellar and never be seen again.
“Oh,” his passenger said agreeably. “Okay. But hey, slow down! You’re kind of a crazy driver, Judge, you know that?”
Patrick was already gone.
He had been following Marty, wanting to see what the man would do next. When he guessed what Marty was going to do-try to blackmail the judge instead of spreading suspicions about Mitch-he knew his own plans were finished. The judge would never stand for blackmail. He would have Marty charged and tossed in jail, Marty would tell the story of how he had come to have the information about his sister, somebody would put two and two together, and Abby would find out that he had tried to betray Mitch.
Patrick drove into town and got a beer, and then he drove out to his parents’ house to tell them he was sick of ranch work and he was leaving town again.
Chapter Forty-two
It was hard to drive when she felt so awful, but Catie was determined to make one last trip to see the Virgin. She hadn’t realized she would feel quite this bad, but then it had been a couple of days since she had even attempted to drive her van. During all that time she had eaten almost nothing. Now she had pain and she had a fever that had been rising higher for the last day or so, but she felt light as air, ethereal, angelic. It was a beautiful night and Catie would have liked to be able to lean her face out the window and look up at it, but it was increasingly all she could do to hold the van on the highway.
She was veering across the center line, she knew she was, but she couldn’t do anything about that. There wasn’t much traffic and she always managed to pull the van back onto her side of the road when a car passed her going the other way. Catie didn’t want to be a danger to anybody, she told herself; she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She just wanted to park in the cemetery one more time and crawl, if she had to, up to the grave and lie on her back again and tell the Virgin how grateful she was for the gift of peace.
It hurt to turn the steering wheel when she made the turn onto Highway 177.
Once she got the van going straight again, it hurt a little less.